Above: Ticket of No Return. Courtesy of Arsenal.
Ulrike Ottinger’s Ticket of No Return (1979) opens on one of the last locations I laid eyes on before the sudden, pandemic-fueled termination of transatlantic travel: Berlin’s Tegel airport, its brutalist baggage claim mostly unchanged between the era of the film’s production and this February’s Berlinale. There, Ottinger was awarded the prestigious Berlinale Camera, recognizing her formative position in New German Cinema, a celebration overdue after years of her work being overlooked while more attention was lavished on her male counterparts. Ticket of No Return follows a sloppy socialite (“a female drinker,” in the original German translation) who lands in the city to imbibe till the point of demise, a desire that felt unfortunately familiar through the darkest months of the spring’s lockdown. Now, even as we tentatively re-emerge into an opening world, Ottinger’s filmography—the subject of a retrospective via Metrograph’s online platform through October—makes for perfect viewing in these tedious times. They index a world somehow weirder than our own, a refreshing exodus from the suffocating grimness of the present.
Ottinger’s films are unfailingly stunning in their visual depth and theatrical richness, demanding to be savored thanks to lengthy takes and drawn-out runtimes. Revisiting her canon nearly half a century on, the director’s “Berlin Trilogy”—Ticket of No Return, Freak Orlando (1981), and Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press (1984)—emerges a highlight, situating Ottinger as a principal of New German Cinema whose warmth and weirdness outshines the movement’s male exponents. A disclaimer: Freak Orlando gave me nightmares, but it came as a relief to have terror provoked by something so firmly outside of current events.
Other details of Ottinger’s filmography are more frustrating, hard to stand behind with the unequivocal admiration that still grips me whenever I revisit Ticket of No Return. Tabea Blumenschein cuts a handsome figure as Chinese Orlando in the ravishing Madame X (1978), although as her character’s name suggests—and her kohl-drenched eyes and ambiguously-Asian outerwear confirm—the sensational, swashbuckling queer pirate queen plays on questionable imaginaries of the Eastern Other. She’s hardly the only stereotypical figure in the film; the first half-hour is a roll call of caricatures, including, delightfully, Yvonne Rainer on roller skates as Josephine de Collage, “an international art lover bored to death by the academic cultural round.” Josephine, alongside a cadre of frustrated females whose lives leave much to be desired even in the wake of women’s lib, defects from the straight world’s banality, skating away to join Chinese Orlando at sea.
Above: Madame X. Courtesy of Arsenal.
Still, there’s a palpable difference in register between the film’s send-up of a frustrated Stepford wife, aptly named Betty Brillo, and her counterpart, Noa-Noa, a “native island girl” we meet fishing as she paddles a lonesome canoe. In a film with a narrative structure as loose and meandering as the ship’s journey on the open sea, the line between problematizing and endorsing these portrayals is uncertain. Does Chinese Orlando’s depravity as she ruins her lovers’ lives equally—her manipulation knows no class or creed—amount to Ottinger’s condemnation of the ethnographic gaze? Or does her madcap antimony to the drab world around her stop short of critiquing the Eurocentric spirit that still feels inescapably latent, in Madame X just as elsewhere in Ottinger’s canon? Ottinger has been held up as the patron of “lesbian camp,” and while the breadth of her work on view evades genre, the title urges reflection: does queerness—however radical it may be, flouting linearity and the “straight” demands of storyline just as much as it foregrounds actual sexuality—immunize these films from other political considerations?
Questions of this nature recur, never quite to settle. I can never set aside the sense that films like Madame X and Freak Orlando take advantage of the bodies that have been coded as different, can never parse whether they work with or against the oppression that this perceived difference catalyzed, in Ottinger’s time as well as our own. To offer a good-faith reading, these films could easily be summed up as a celebration of difference, calls for solidarity among the exploited. There’s a feminist gesture in Ottinger’s rejection of straightforward narrative and form, refusing to position the women who populate her films in line with the cinematographically-constructed demands of “to-be-looked-at-ness” that, even by the 1970s and ‘80s, dominated mass-cultural representations of women onscreen. Yet that same disavowal, in denying any narrative framing that might elucidate the films’ underlying politics, can make them feel, at times, more like pageants—trotting out the “strange” and “zany” to an indeterminate end.
The second installment in the Berlin trilogy, Freak Orlando, is one such showboat of spectacle. The titular “freaks”—gay men, bearded women, people with dwarfism and other physical disabilities—cavort through bleak West German landscapes that resist placement in space or time, moving from mystical department stores to coal fields and fairgrounds. BDSM leather daddies are elevated to the level of righteous religious self-flagellants, their procession punctuating the film with ecstatic grunts as they wander between sooty industrial scenes. Freak Orlando is a raucous celebration of extremity, a cavalcade of strangeness unburdened by narrative constraints. Nothing about it wants for a storyline, but perhaps in part because its form is so arcane, its ethical implications are also completely confounding. Is it a jubilant invitation to embrace divergence? Or rather, does it come across an uncritical caricature, its depiction of diversity less satire than ridicule? For all the ways in which Ottinger’s early filmography feels outside of time, it also telegraphs a sense of ethnographic excess that is distinctly of its era.
Above: Freak Orlando. Courtesy of Arsenal.
Adjudicating whether these films are, in internet parlance, “problematic,” is not exactly my goal here. Ottinger herself vocally eschews these kinds of calculations; to circumscribe her rich and engrossing retrospective with the dismissive wrist-flick of “cancellation” is a service to nobody. Nevertheless, these delicate questions bear consideration as Ottinger finally gets her due among the masters of New German Cinema. Her work is profane by design, an affront to any rule-set—whether that is a harmful convention like heteronormativity, or, at times, just plain old cultural sensitivity. The series makes for challenging viewing insofar as its celebration of difference can, at times, feel like a relic of the outré anthropological gaze. Bearing that in mind, there is also something undeniably powerful about a lesbian pirate fairytale with Yvonne Rainer at its center. The question isn’t so much about what can or should be excused, but rather, of how to hold multiple truths in balance—to be engrossed by these strange, sapphic tales without letting them off-hook for the pieces that lapse into retrograde.
In her most recent release, Paris Calligrammes (2020)—which debuted at this year’s Berlinale, but is not included in the Metrograph retrospective—Ottinger explains how she wound down her time in Left Bank Paris because, in the wake of May ’68, what once felt like dissent had morphed into an obligatory party line. It was precisely the suffocation of discursive nuance that drove Ottinger back to Berlin, where she gave up her early career as a painter and turned her practice towards the screen, eventually to create the films on view in this series. The tricky dimensions of her cinema don’t fully resolve, even when squared with the director’s own experience of marginalization—but the expectation that they ought to is, by her own adamant evaluation, equally counterproductive. Taking in the retrospective as a whole, I’m left with the impression that these knotty contradictions offer something generative—a politics of queer impropriety in the process of being articulated, left open-ended to future expansion.
A retrospective devoted Ulrike Ottinger is showing August - October, 2020 at Metrograph's digital cinema.